Looking back a year and half, or more, you may perhaps be able to recal a Letter of Lord Hervey's1 (date about 1733 or ’34, to whom addressed I have forgotten; giving a lively sketch of the sublime ennui and hopeless solemn vacancy of George II's Court, on a certain evening at Windsor),—which was shewn you by Forster, on my
part, for the sake of getting some commentary from you on one or two of the Figures introduced. The Commentary, I remember,
was kindly afforded: my Copy of the Letter with your commentary on it, and all the proper Apparatus Criticus, was there upon safely reposited here,—no doubt in the best place I cd choose for finding it again when the time shd come.

Well; time has come,—some use possible in that Letter for me now or else no chance of any ever;— —and, for my life, I cannot come upon the trace of it; cannot even find out what Book it was got from: it has gone again, like a little fish caught, into the immeasurable ocean with all its fishes and whales!—
It is not in Hervey's Memoirs of George II;2 nowhere in Walpole;3 I cannot the least guess where it is.

If you could discover for me, or perhaps you know witht searching, and could beneficently point out,—I shd soon have another Copy.4 If you cannot, I must say good b’ye to the thing. I was by no means certain I could find use for it in the place where I am; but it is provoking not to be able to decide on clear grounds.

In the name of all rational mortals, I entreat you put a right Index to these your Walpole Volumes;5—also I hope you will gather the scattered Notices of Persons mentioned (footnotes, which one can never find again) into some kind of Alphabetical Order;—and in short are thinking (what has never yet in the least been done in ‘editing’
such Books) that perhaps here and there a rational human being, with serious purposes, may wish to read them humanly,—not bestially, as oxen eat from a hay—now they have got access to, solely for their momentary convenience!— — I design to be into yr Walpole (an excellt clever fellow, in spite of all the balderdash we have heard upon him), so soon as I am out of this dreadful Prussian Bottomless-Pool, where I can hardly swim alive.

Don't mind the Hervey letter much, or make long search after it. If you report nothing, I will make shift witht it, better or worse shift, who knows which!

Yours ever truly / T. Carlyle

Frank your brave Brother6 sent me a little Printed Piece (Sir T. Monroe's) out of India lately;7 whh I was very glad of. Kind regards at home, and to your good Mother especially.8 Ah me!—

4. Cunningham replied, 26 Nov., with information about where to find a printed version of the letter from Lord Hervey to Mrs. Clayton; the original was
in the British Museum; it was not included in Frederick.

5. Cunningham replied: “I am getting well on and through … Walpole's Letters. You will like I think the Index.” He concluded,
“I have a few corrections to give you in your Oliver's book—I made them the other day in your last Edition. They are tombstone
touches about his children.” The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, ed. Peter Cunningham, 2 vols. (1857); 9 vols. (1857–59).

6. Francis Cunningham (1820–75; ODNB), officer in the Indian Army; later literary ed. of 17th-cent. English playwrights.

7. Liberty of the Press in India: A minute written by Sir T. Munro, thirty-five years ago (Calcutta, 1857). Sir Thomas Munro (1761–1827), b. Glasgow, colonial Indian administrator, brig. gen., gov. of Madras, 1819. Munro warned against introducing freedom of the press in India: “Were the people all our countrymen, I would prefer the
utmost freedom of the press; but as they are, nothing could be more dangerous than such freedom. … We are trying an experiment
never yet tried in the world; maintaining a foreign dominion by means of a native army, and teaching that army, through a
free press, that they ought to expel us and deliver their country. … It is only as regards the natives, that the press can
be viewed with apprehension; and it is only when it comes to agitate our native army, that its terrible effects will be felt”
(3, 11). Lord Canning's suspension of the press in India, 12 June, restricted both the English-language and Indian press by making them apply for licenses that could be withdrawn without
notice. The Times and the Examiner opposed the legislation, with the latter arguing, 12 Sept., that Canning should have limited “the liberty of the press in India to publications in the English language. … As to the
Indians, they never will be fit to be entrusted with the liberty of the press in their own tongues as long as they stand towards
us in the relation of conquered to conquerors.”